Donald Rumsfeld on terror: Are we winning?

The recent deadly attacks at home and abroad – at the Boston Marathon and the American diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya - are the most recent evidence for a point Donald Rumsfeld has been making for some time: “This isn’t going to be won with bullets.”

Rumsfeld, in a wide-ranging interview with POLITICO, said he’s more convinced than ever that America has dropped the ball when it comes to what he describes as the potentially decisive “competition of ideas” in the fight against Islamic fanaticism - and he lays blame for that not only at President Barack Obama’s door, but also at the Bush administration.

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POLITICO interview: Rumsfeld on book, current events

In the interview, Rumsfeld, who’s promoting a new book, spoke about the Boston bombings, offered a scathing critique of what went wrong in Benghazi and Hillary Clinton’s role, and said he fears that the U.S will remain the bull’s eye for radical Muslim extremists for decades to come.

When asked if America is winning or losing what was called “the war on terror” in the Bush administration, Rumsfeld said it’s worse than that.

“We don’t have metrics to know whether we’re winning or losing,” he said. “Are more people being dissuaded from becoming terrorists? Are more people being captured or killed who are terrorists than the number of people being brought into these madrassas and being trained and recruited to go out and kill additional people? I don’t know. We don’t know. The world doesn’t know.”

Here, Rumsfeld turned to an important theme in his conversation last week with POLITICO - the “competition of ideas” with radical Islam, a phrase the former secretary of defense has used repeatedly since leaving office - and he leveled his criticism at both Obama and his former boss, George W. Bush.

“Part of the reason we don’t know [if America is winning] is because this administration — and I must say the prior administration didn’t do well at it, either — has been slow engaging in the ‘competition of ideas’. This is much more like the Cold War: It’s going to last decades,” Rumsfeld said. “If someone can go on the Internet and teach people to become radicalized, which happens, we don’t have to fight an army or a navy or an air force. … I don’t think either administration have done very well in terms of recognizing that this isn’t going to be won with bullets. This is going to be won much more like the Cold War.”

And Rumsfeld took Obama to task for not confronting Islamic radicalism more directly.